Leaving money on the Table: How publishers can avoid missed opportunities to earn more money

The money is on the table. Unfortunately, some publishers might be missing an opportunity to collect it. Sometimes it comes down to small adjustments — or adopting new concepts that won’t damage the UX — that can generate more revenue, expand your business, and positively impact our online advertising world.

Read on to find some insights and trends (both uncommon and perhaps even conflicting) that are easy to implement and guarantee a financial and operational profit.

5 Ways for Publishers to Boost Their Profit

The floor price game: Simply setting a static floor rate CPM and watching the money come in isn’t a good enough plan, and it won’t maximize your revenue potential. Instead, you want to play with the demand floor rates to find the sweet spot that combines a good fill rate and revenue.

Generally speaking, our recommendation is to lower the floor rate at the beginning of the month (when the market demand is lower) and to increase the floor rate at the end of the month (when the market demand is much higher). Moreover, if you see a good fill rate? try to increase the floor rate (the opposite also applies).

Get rid of multiple ad placements: Having a lot of ad-placements on your site can hurt the overall user experience. That’s because too many ad placements can slow a site’s loading time, damage viewability percentages, and require labor (without proper reward).

It’s better to focus on the profitable ad placements on a site as opposed to many ad-placements. For example, Anchored-ads (or “Sticky-Ads”) that generate 70%-80% viewability score, and can be placed in non-intrusive placements (such as Mobile 320×50 BTF/ Desktop 728×90 BTF etc.).

Get a retainer for your inventory: Set an exclusive deal for the long term (quarterly or even yearly) on fixed CPM and with 100% fill rate. Setting these kinds of deals for some of your site inventory will give you guaranteed income (on your ad server: set sponsorship type line-item with caps). It will also provide you with more time and flexibility to bring in direct campaigns for the rest of your inventory.

Move into a revenue-share pricing deal: To monetize all of your inventory without much effort, you can set a revenue-share pricing deal with a minimum CPM rate. This way, the rate will be determined by real demand during the auction. Also, it will ensure that all of your inventory will be monetized without any loss. (Remember that this can also be done only for your remnant inventory).

First-price auction: Setting a strict floor rate used to be a way to protect your inventory in second-price auctions. However, since the market has moved from Tag-based activity to Header-Bidding, Google has moved to first-price auctions. Consequently, our recommendation is to set a lower floor rate (lower than what you would have set in the past) to give more bidders/buyers a chance to bid on your inventory; lowering the floor rate will increase your fill rate.

These five strategies, implemented by many of our publishers, have proven to be successful with excellent results. See for yourself!